Trend Report: Tea Is The New Mead

March 21, 2011

In the canon of manly (or womanly, thank you very much) things, three drinks reign supreme: beer, whiskey, and coffee. Or so we’ve been told. Wanna really and truly send a rush of blood to your bits? Drink some fuckin’ tea. I’ve been saying for years that tea is the most bitchin’ beverage, but it’s…

Dorian Rainwater & Thomas Romero’s (Noisear) Top 5 Influential Grind Songs

March 18, 2011

Hello All! Dorian Rainwater and Thomas Romero of Noisear here. We have been asked to give a Top 5 feature by the amazing people at Decibel Magazine. We have chosen to give our main influences in the extreme metal/grindcore genre, which have had a huge impact on us and serve as a key element to…

The Lazarus Pit: Hades’ Resisting Success

March 18, 2011

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love, stuff that’s essential listening for students of extreme metal that you may not have ever heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  Actually,…

Black Metal Book Club

March 17, 2011

Our first entry for this darkened covenant is The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge by Matthew Simmons. It’s a fifty-page novella, short enough for even the busiest corpse-painter in the land, and intersperses schizophrenic tales of having fists for fingers and trips to Mars with the author’s imaginings of the lives of black metal musicians…

Oscar Dronjak’s (HammerFall) MMA Hammer of Justice, Part 7

March 16, 2011

ZUFFA PURCHASES STRIKEFORCE: Drunken Hallucination or Impossible Reality? When I first read the news about this unexpected deal, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I was at an after party here in Göteborg (HammerFall had just had a listening session for our new album with journalists from all over Europe) and I was just checking the…

Not Exclusive: Amebix in the Studio

March 16, 2011

We all know Amebix is back and that Sonic Mass, their first album in 24 goddamn years, is dropping 9/20/11. But for those of you who are curious as to how the crust trailblazers have been faring in the studio, here is a taste of the band at Lodge Recording Studios in Northampton, laying down…

Graf Orlock Steadicam Reviews: Battle: Los Angeles

March 16, 2011

Opinions are like assholes: everyone IS one. We’ve noticed that they tend to spend a lot of time in Hollywood, chortling while you spend perfectly good alcohol/meth/falafel money on the anal fissures of their “imagination.” Justin Smith of cinema-grind moguls Graf Orlock will occasionally plumb the depths in Graf Orlock Steadicam Reviews. Hollywood has had…

Justify Your Shitty Taste – Carcass’s “Swansong”

March 16, 2011

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The…

Varg Vikernes (Burzum) interviewed

March 15, 2011

Do you see much similarity—musically, thematically—between Belus and new album Fallen?Varg Vikernes: Yes I do. Musically because it’s still Burzum (…) and thematically because to some degree Fallen deals with the same subject, only it’s not in a mythological context, and on a personal level. I know you didn’t see Belus as black metal. But…

Hades Looks Like It Has Been Taken Over By My Uncle’s Bar Band & The Make-Up Artist From A Shakespeare Festival

March 15, 2011

Lord, maybe it’s because the video is a cross between Shaun of the Dead and Spinal Tap or perhaps because the song is such an awesome, intricate, swirling mass of NWOBHM riffage, but I can’t get enough of the spectacle that is HELL’s new video for “On Earth As It Is In Hell”: HELL has…